The door opened with a loud, long, creak. Sharon raised her head from her study of the floorboards to meet the eyes of a tall, slender girl with wheat-colored hair. Her deep blue eyes were like…like the ocean was supposed to be in movies. Sharon was stunned. People weren't this beautiful in Gloucester. Nothing was beautiful in Gloucester.

"You must be Sharon." The girl said, in a voice that had clear, even tones. "I'm Liz—Elizabeth Franklin. C'mon in." The door opened wider, and Sharon hesitantly stepped in, bending down to unlace her shoes for the benefit of the hardwood floor. Elizabeth stood silently by her side as Sharon completed the task, and smiled kindly as Sharon got up.

"So I heard you just moved up here." Elizabeth said. "From Carmen."

"Carmen made it sound like you knew I'd be here already." Sharon said, curious.

"Well, I hear a lot of what goes on. It's like a small town up on the bluff…we're pretty separate from the rest of the island."

Sharon thought about Gloucester. Everyone had hated her there, just because she liked to look out for herself. People there, those morning-housewives in particular, didn't understand pride. They thought that if someone offered to butt in on your problems and fix your life for you, you ought to immediately drop all pretenses of perhaps justified superiority and cry to the heavens your gratitude. Sharon had thought it was all a bunch of bull. Hence, she had been quite the black sheep in the tiny fishing town. "Yeah, I know what that's like."

"Well, it's a little different here." Elizabeth said. "For reasons I'm sure you'll find out. What kind of tea do you like?"

"Oh, whatever you've got." Sharon said, not wanting to reveal that to her, tea was tea. A bizarre proposition in New England, to be true, but in Gloucester, among her step-father's friends, the refined knew the difference between Southern Comfort and Jack Daniel's. One did not waste their time discerning the merits of liquids without alcohol.

"I'll just go with the orange spice, then." Liz said. "The kitchen's this way…Carmen is in there, too." Elizabeth led Sharon down a dark, cramped, narrow corridor hung with what looked like old paintings. You could hardly see them in the dark. Obediently, Sharon followed.

The kitchen was beautiful. In all of the houses Sharon had been in before, a kitchen was just that: a room for preparing food. This kitchen looked far more lived in. With its dark-red walls and huge brick walk-in hearth, the look was one of warmth and a happy home. Flowers hung upside-down from nails in the wall, and some sprays of white flowers that smelt almost unnaturally sweet graced the mantle above the hearth. The table was small and intimate, and even the spice rack looked like a piece of living history, art as well as something that served a practical purpose.

"Well, this is our kitchen. Sorry it isn't as clean as it could be." Liz said, rummaging through the cupboards for a box of tea and a teapot, which she put on the more modern gas-range.

"It's beautiful in here." Sharon said wonderingly, not being able to think of much more to say about it. This felt like a place where anyone would be, bizarrely enough, welcomed and loved. She could picture roasting chestnuts in that hearth, relaxing here on Sunday mornings...like the girls were already her best friends.

Liz smiled. "I think so too. I love this room, more than any other in the house. Kitchens were like the family rooms back in puritan times, you know. That's the original front door of the house." She said, pointing behind her. Sharon examined it and saw that was indeed made of a heavier wood, and through the kitchen window could see a path leading outside. Liz turned away from adjusting the heat, back towards Sharon. "Carmen and I have been on our own for awhile. Or, it seems like it. Adults here just kind of leave us to our own ends, you might say. We stock and keep the kitchen pretty much on our own--we're down here more often than we're in our bedrooms. I wonder where she is..." She said, her voice trailing off as she sought the honey, the sparse tinfoil-wrapped lemon slices, and various other tea accoutrements.

Carmen popped out from around a corner; she must have just come down the stairs. "Hi there." She said, in a voice that was somehow simultaneously full of light and shadow. Her smile was sincere, and yet her eyes glimmered wickedly. "I see you've met Liz, Sharon. And vice-versa. Getting along well?"

Sharon tried to smile, not wanting to make a bad impression with her usual sulk. "We were talking about your house, actually. I've never seen anything like it."

Carmen laughed merrily, and Sharon paused for a moment just to listen to the music in the rich tones. "You've gotten on her good side already, then. Liz feels quite responsible for the house."

"If I don't take care of it, who will?" Liz asked sensibly. "Certainly not you." Carmen stuck out her tongue. "It's a beautiful old place."

"You won't catch me complaining." Carmen said. "I never have to do dishes."

"That's because you break them." Liz said pertly. The teapot began to whistle. Elizabeth retrieved a potholder and brought the tea over to the table. The fingers of her other hand encircled the handles of three delicate teacups. "The best china." She said, and smiled.

"Oh?" Sharon asked, looking at the beautiful little cup. Like everything else in the kitchen, it was beautiful and old-fashioned. It looked like it had been carved from bone hundreds of years ago, or shipped packed in tissues from London, or something.

"Don't believe it. Garage sale, two dollars." Carmen said. Liz rolled her eyes.

"It's my mother's, actually. But she's given it all to me. Sort of." Liz explained.

"She means it's somewhere between given and taken. Liz's mom isn't...too right in the head. So you might say." Liz shot Carmen a look. Sharon shivered.

"Something like that." Liz said, and for a second those beautiful blue eyes looked irreconcilably sad, as if they had done something that really couldn't be helped, but that had been necessary.

"I understand." Sharon said, looking down at her orange-brown tea. There had been times when Mom was so drunk she just wouldn't get out of bed. It hadn't been the same as her step-father though. Sharon hadn't blamed her mom for drinking--she drank for a reason. The asshole drank from habit. Sharon hated talking to her step-father, and the thought of him touching her mom made her wants to puke her guts up. So she had let her mom be sick. It was better than making her mom stay awake.

Liz nodded almost imperceptibly, as if she could see from the inside Sharon's eyes that yes, she did know.

There was a silence for the following few minutes, almost as if everyone was trying to think of another topic simultaneously. Sharon had never liked those awkward silences, but that was mainly because those silences had come during tea-times with Gloucester mothers who expected her to say something very different from what she actually wanted to say. In this comfortable kitchen, with these nice girls, Sharon wouldn't have minded being silent forever, just absorbing the feeling of acceptance in the air.

"So what kind of stuff do you like to do, Sharon?" Carmen asked, neatly breaking into the silence in a murmuring tone that didn't disrupt the peaceful feeling.

"I..." for some reason, Sharon didn't want to tell these girls the normal lies she told the Gloucester women. Nothing about studying, studying, studying, or helping her parents a lot of the time, at which point the women had always met eyes somewhere beyond Sharon's head, sharing a knowing glance. "I like to run." She said, her face kind of dreamy at this hereto-unknown prospect of telling the truth. "In Gloucester, I used to run on the beach all the time. Maybe I can do that here, too."

Carmen made a face. "The beach...now that I can understand." She said with a wink in Liz's direction that must have been a reference to some past event. Liz sighed and glanced heavenward. "But running? Not that I'm lazy, but I never imagined the process as being one of pleasure. Explains why you're so skinny, though." She said, glancing pointedly at Sharon's size-three waist.

Sharon laughed bitterly. "Actually, the paunch I got from my mom. Super-high metabolism. I faint sometimes if I haven't had anything to eat."

Carmen pursed her lips and sipped her tea as if to hide her expression. "Bitch." She said, but smiled to alleviate any pain. Sharon was startled into her first genuine laugh in months, and had to swallow carefully to avoid getting tea in her nose.

"Right back 'atcha." Sharon said in return. Liz giggled. "No, but I run because it feels like flying. Like..." She though of trying to explain the feeling of emulating the pattern to them, but didn't. "Like it's what I'm supposed to do."

Liz chuckled. "I don't think Carmen has ever done a single thing she was supposed to do, if she could help it."

"I'm helpful!" Carmen exclaimed, and looked a little cross. "Old ladies across the street, campfire girls, that's my thing. Benefiting your fellow man."

"I didn't mean that." Liz said, looking almost thoughtful. "I meant, like doing what your parents told you to. The obedient daughter and all."

Carmen snorted. "Like you're one to talk. And I don't because most of the time, they're wrong. I have my own set of morals...I don't need to follow anyone else's like a sheep. I help my people, and they help me, and everything's worked out fine so far, I'd say."

"Ah, yes. The clan matriarch." Liz said, slightly sarcastically.

Carmen howled with laughter. "I'm no mother. Kids are absolutely beyond me. They're not even interesting till they're five or so, and I have no patience for runny noses and stinky diapers and occasional cuteness."

Liz's face seemed almost to clarify, and Sharon thought she could have sworn that her eyes turned a bluer blue. "A pity, since your role percludes so much motherhood."

Carmen narrowed her eyes and didn't say anything for thirty seconds while the silence got more and more profound. Since her statement, Liz hadn't spoken either, and Sharon was content to just watch the drama unfold. "You," She said to Sharon, without turning to look at her, her concentration focused on the strangely-still Elizabeth, "have just witnessed one of the things that makes us on Crowhaven Road the freaks of New Salem."

Now it was Sharon's turn to throw back a skeptical look of her own. "What?" She asked, only slightly confused. The fact that she confused only slightly worried her more than the fact of the confusion.

"Liz tells the future, sometimes. Always in situations most inconvenient. In a few seconds she'll come to and it's our job to tell her what she said." Carmen finally turned to face Sharon. "Welcome to Crowhaven Road. You in?"

Sharon paused, and nodded. "Yeah, sure. I've done stranger things than baby-sit a clairvoyant."

Carmen grinned. "Not yet...but stick with us kid, and I'm sure you will."

There had always been two kinds of summer days in Gloucester: nice and not-so-nice. Though Sharon's terminology for living in Gloucester might seem to be simplistic and childish, when explored, those words offered all of the rarefied options that either of those kinds of days revolved around.

For instance: Smell. On nice days, the smell was of the ocean and the breeze and the sand, a sort of warm laziness and yet sharp mobility that allowed Sharon to remember all of the good things about living in the tiny fishing town, of which there weren't many. The determination, for one thing. Never mind the nosy housewives: the town in itself seemed to have a sturdiness, an idea that they would survive on their own no matter the struggle.

Maybe the nosy fisherwives were a flip side of the coin, a hand that desperately wanted to help those less fortunate since no one had helped them in their own less fortunate times. Sharon started to see this point of view during the nice days in August, of which there was a decided minority. She began to be...not grateful, but empathetically appreciative that at least the people here cared, even if Sharon personally chose to renounce the physical embodiments of that care.

During the not-so-nice days, the smell was one of depression and alcohol and dead things, combined with a robotic sort of helplessness that wasn't really a smell. On these days, the wives didn't approach her house, and if Sharon ran into them on the street when walking home from school, the greeting in their eyes was all the same-- "Oh, it's her again," no matter their outward cheer. On these days, Sharon was free to ponder what the real problem with Gloucester, and hence the problem with her living in Gloucester, actually was. Gloucester was a place no one really wanted to be. You always got there through some sort of bad luck; by birth or by marriage or by finance. It wasn't even a second choice that people could accept with a sort of half-hearted cheer. It was the New England version of a ghetto, the sort of place you end up living in if any of your other options couldn't possibly be any better.

In Sharon's case, she discovered, the bad luck had come really on her mother's behalf. Her mom had apparently grown up in a nice enough neighborhood, and then somehow had gotten stuck down here. Sharon scrounged in the dusty old attic and in the packed-up cases of her mother's things that still smelled of moth balls, and found an item precious beyond imagining: a photo album. Pictures of her mother when she was young, playing on the beach or in flower gardens or on front lawns. There were other pictures of what Sharon assumed to be other places in the geographic area where her mother had grown up: the houses were all the same, big sturdy New Englanders with a sort of Cape Cod-Boston flavor, looking much dilapidated by the years. As far as Sharon could tell, there was only a one-lane road going between the two long rows of houses, which must have been up on a bluff overlooking that beach she saw so often in these photos.

The lady that Sharon assumed to be her grandmother, the woman who was always with the gleeful curly red-haired baby, looked stern and severe, wearing large hats to keep the sun out her eyes and holding the child up for photos dressed in immaculate outfits. She was never on the beach with the baby however; that task fell to a slightly-wilder looking man with a mustache who Sharon assumed must be her grandfather. As the baby got older, though, the pictures of grandparents fell away, and pictures of friends began to replace them.

Sharon scanned all of the latter pictures eagerly, examining the faces and eyes and hair, trying to find a picture of her father. She found a picture of what could have been a young Pete Hooker...the man's face had that hard set to it, with the large nose and dark eyes, and the hair could have been blonde. The photos were all black-and-white, of course, but the likeness was fair. The-Pete-Hooker-esque-guy was commonly pictured with two or three other boys--a studious looking one with dark hair, one that looked kind of wild with longish red hair, and one with bone-straight dark hair and high cheekbones, skinny and severe. If Sharon had to place a bet on her lineage, she'd go for the skinny one, hands down. But there wasn't a single picture of her mother and him together to cement the idea. It was hugely frustrating.

Towards the end of the album there was a solitary portrait of the skinny guy, a couple years after all the group photos had been taken. Some of the photos had her mother's writing on the back. It was how she had found out the location of all these houses as Crowhaven Road, New Salem. Some pictures had nothing at all. But usually, if there was writing on the back, her mother would make some sort of the comment-- "Greg and the whole group," that sort of thing. The portrait only had, "Mark, 1953." And that was it.

No telling how this town looked now, of course. She'd be hanging out with the kids of all of these people, so now matter how nice they all looked in the photographs, their kids could be complete and utter bastards. All isolated up there on the bluff like that, if she didn't like them, she'd be stuck. And yet, there might be chances up there. The idea of chances, of hope, of places beyond Gloucester, infused a golden sparkle in her chest. She might be able to go to a place where a school was actually nearby, with people who cared about her and not her personal problems. The chance might be small...but there was a chance.

And something else that the alternately nice days and not-so-nice days during her last months in Gloucester made her realize; like a ladybug, she had this itch to throw off her shell. She was too old for this place, for the people that thought they could run her life, too mature. She had to get out, and it looked like there was only one place to go. Seeing that picture of Pete Hooker--well, it at least looked legit. And what choice did she have? Even if she wound up dead on the roadside because he turned out to be a small-town boy gone crazy, it had to be better than this life that was not a life, hope frozen before it sparked.

She went to school with the same zeal she always had, which wasn't much. These teachers weren't looking to inspire Sharon; they were looking to cram as much necessary information as possible into her schooling before she inevitably dropped out like the rest of the girls. Out of a high school of seven hundred, the graduating class was a whopping fifteen percent of that.

The change to her life, after she decided definitely to go with Pete Hooker whenever he came around again, was the sense of suspense, the waiting. It wasn't like it was keeping her on the edge of her chair--he and New Salem weren't as desirable as all that. But now that her life had a glimmer of hope, she was willing to fight to the death to keep it. She began to avoid her stepfather with a sort of actual determination, as opposed to the apathetic dislike she had used to edge away from him before. She had hardly seen him since the summer had started. Now summer was drawing to a close, and she was almost beginning to enjoy life again.

She had tempted fate a little bit by stealing a beer from her stepfather's private fridge, but it was too nice out here, in the blue dusk with the nice-smelling-air and the fireflies not to celebrate in some fashion. Pop had crashed before the sky had grown dark, going out again to hunt the elusive swordfish in the pre-dawn, which was why she felt safe in stealing the booze--she wasn't in the mood any more these days to really risk her neck. And then she smelled it. Cigarette smoke.

She went to the edge of the porch and tried to see, peering into the twilight, but the medium blue of the earlier dusk had faded to a deep prussian color, full of mystery, that the stars weren't quite showing through yet. But look, there was the moon, just rising now, a silvery beacon on the horizon. If she tilted her head back and looked just the right way...

Her eyes fell directly on to Pete Hooker.

"So we meet again." He said. He took out his cigarette to do it, though. There was something careful and interested in the gesture, almost as if he didn't want to offend her--or scare her off. Sharon determined in an instant that she would act precisely as if nothing in the world could scare her, and lifted her chin regally.

"Ha." He said, without a chuckle. "You've changed." His eyes, as dark a blue as the night sky now, studied her. "Or maybe you haven't. Maybe you just learned to use what you've already got."

"Could we get to the point, please?" Sharon asked quietly, and for a second Pete's eyes looked startled, innocent. He looked off into the distance.

"Maybe we could." He said. Something strange was happening to Sharon though, that made her wonder if she had heard the words at all. An impression was coming into her head, almost an image, like a whisper just barely heard somewhere behind and above her head. The words, Does she know how much she sounds like her mom? Nah...even if she did, she'd block it out. Was that what he was thinking? Could she hear his thoughts?

"I sound like my mom, huh?" Sharon asked, staring off into another part of the night. This time it looked as if Pete was trying to pretend he hadn't heard her. But finally he ran a hand through his windblown hair and replied.

"Yeah, you do." He said. "Looks like no one had to worry about you...the blood leaks through, every time."

Sharon's brow wrinkled. "Blood? What do you mean?" She leaned against one of the porch's posts. "Is it something to do with my dad?"

"Kind of." Pete said, and seemed reluctant to tell her. "How much do you know?"

"His name was Mark." Sharon said. "He looked like me. Or, more like me than mom did."

"Both right." Pete affirmed. "How'd you find out?"

"I found an old photo album of my mom's. And I guessed."

"Ought look through those old papers some more. You might find some interesting stuff." Pete said, as the cigarette burned itself down to his strangely still fingers.

"Like what?" Sharon asked sharply. "If you know, you could tell me. I'm kind of tired of these games. Seems to me like I've had them played on me my whole life."

"Played with you. Not on you. It's an important difference." Pete said. "I'll tell you, but you won't believe me."

"Try me." Sharon said, taking another swig of her beer and moving to the front steps for a more opposing position.

"Okay." Pete said, in a devil-may-care voice. "But don't forget you asked for it." He crushed the cigarette out on Sharon's concrete front walk, and leaned against the porch rail on the side of the stairs opposite from Sharon. Sharon stood up to meet his eyes immediately, goading him on.

"So. You probably already knew this, but your mom grew up, with me and a couple other folks, on an island called New Salem. It's north of here...you go up this old highway and over a bridge to it."

"It's got beaches."

"An island oughta. Can I finish?" Sharon was silent.

"Your mom and dad never got married." Sharon choked on her mouthful. When she recovered, she wasn't angry, just a little exasperated that God had seen fit to place this on top of everything else.

"Great." Sharon said.

"That's important." Pete said, and then he waited until Sharon had coughed a little bit and was back to about normal.

"Oh? I'm just dying to hear how." Sharon said stonily.

"Good." Pete said, right on cue. "I'll tell you. They never got married because of your mom's family. They were rich old bastards. They wanted her to marry someone else, and she refused. She fell in love with your dad, had you, and then your dad died. It...wasn't a pretty picture."

"What'd he die of?" Sharon asked, and got only silence as her reply.

"Oh, for God's sake. I can know that, can't I?" She asked sharply. "It might be important or something."

Pete's lips turned down as he thought about it. Finally, he shook his head.

"No. It's better this way. You'll find out when you're meant to. But he's dead. Trust me on that one."

Sharon hiked an eyebrow. "Do you often have people mistrusting you about the accuracy of other's deaths?" Pete just shrugged.

"I've been doing this for awhile. Going around, trying to find folks that are lost. I wouldn't hold it against you...but I'm telling you, it's true. It's a bumpy road you got to go down, kid. It'll just be easier if you trust me." Sharon said nothing, but Pete ignored her attempt to place awkwardness in the conversation and plowed right on ahead.

"It was a confusing time, maybe that's a better way to put it. Anyway, in the mess, your mom's family denounced her, the rest of us got scattered, and I guess she found your stepfather. I'll never say she fell in love with him--" And the tone in his voice was dark with hated when he said the word, "but he probably wined her and dined her and acted romantic. She was always a sucker for that kind of thing, and she was so pretty guys were after her all the time."

"I'm so glad to know that. Raises her so much higher in my eyes." Sharon said sarcastically, and Pete looked at her, the ice in his eyes now pinning her to the porch.

"Hush it. You don't know anything, and you won't, ever, if you don't shut up and listen. You've got a smart mouth." But Sharon was too stubborn to give anything even related to an apology, ticket-out-of-Gloucester or not. "Lots of people liked your mom. And not just because she was pretty. I just wanted you to know that when she wound up here, she wasn't trying to hurt you. I thought that might be important to you. That's all."

"And after that?" Sharon asked. "You were just slumming in Gloucester and caught sight of me? Traced my utility bills? What?"

"Kind of." Pete said. "I had letters from your mom for awhile...we used to talk about a lot of stuff. She told me she was marrying this fisherman. I hunted around with her surname. It helped that you weren't registered for anything under your stepfather's name."

"Mom didn't want me to be. She was so insistent, even though he smacked her for it."

"He would hit her?" Pete asked, intensely.

Instantly, Sharon knew she had gone too far. Some things were not meant to be told. "Yeah. When he was real drunk."

Pete's gaze shifted to the upstairs windows. "Bastard oughta burn in hell."

"You knew he hit me, last time you came. You think she was so different? You think she was everyone's precious darling, the way she was yours? Some people don't want to cherish nice things, you know. Some people just want to destroy them!" Sharon said, and quickly looked the other way, wiping her face with the back of her hand as a stubborn tear ran down her cheek. Pete's hand descended to envelope her thin shoulder, and Sharon gasped and moved away from it.

"Not everyone is out to hurt you, kid." Pete said.

"Well, excuse me if I've turned up all the bad pennies. It's not my fault." Sharon said.

"Yeah. I know what that's like." Pete said, and then he was silent for a minute. "So...now that you've heard...want to come with me? To New Salem?"

Sharon held her breath. It was her dearest hope. But he didn't need to know that. "Dunno. Who would I live with, now that both my parents are dead? Mom's family? They didn't want me then...why should I live with them now?"

"I found a place." Pete said. "At first I thought I could maybe put you in with your cousin's family--"

"I have cousins?" Sharon asked, in shock.

"Yeah, you do. A lot of them, actually. Second cousins and third cousins and removed cousins...the whole bit. But anyway. Fact is, your first cousin is being raised by his grandpa, and it wouldn't really be fair to foist a teenage girl on the old geezer. So I thought you could live with my kids."

"Your kids?" Sharon asked in surprised. "What, you fathered a conclave? Like the lost boys?"

Pete laughed. "Only one's mine, actually. My daughter Linda. But I hardly ever see them, so you wouldn't have to worry about running into me. Her and her half-brother David live with their mom. She's real sweet. She said she'd take you in."

"She would? When she's not even my family?" Sharon asked skeptically. And what kind of man, thought the genie in the back of her mind, talked about his own wife/ex-wife/lover in such a patronizing tone? Real sweet? Excuse me, hun, but you've already got two kids...want one more? Thanks, you're such a sweetie. And then Sharon had to stifle a giggle because that sentence captured Pete's personality perfectly: straightforward, tough if he had to be, with a tortured sort of kindness that the world had done it's best to stamp out. And it was still trying.

"If I were you, I wouldn't be putting much trust in the direct family bonds at this point, seeing what they've already done for you." Pete continued, pointing out. "And if you want to get technical, the whole bluff, our people, descended from the same eighty folks or so, three hundred years back. We're all related in there somehow. Leslie is real nice. You don't have to worry about her."

"Well." Sharon said. "I guess it's a deal then. When?"

"When do you want to go? Need any time to pack up your stuff?"

Sharon thought. "He's going off on a fishing trip again. If I'm conveniently gone when he leaves, I can pack my stuff during the day. If you could come get me tomorrow night, it'd be great."

"Wonderful." Pete said, and though he didn't smile, his eyes did brighten. "It's a plan."

"I guess...thanks, then." Sharon said, not grudgingly, but with the rust of someone who hasn't said the words for so long, having drowned in an ocean of enforced self-sufficiency.

"No Problem." Pete said, tossing off this gesture of gratitude-for-gratitude in a beautifully nonchalant way. It was everything Sharon had ever hoped for…to be able to say thank you and not have someone respond to it as if were ridiculously important or ridiculously unimportant. Pete's 'no problem', was utterly free of social constructs, of debts, of mental games. A favor, and a thank you. That was it. It was fresh air after cloying smog and perfume. Sharon was startled into stillness for a moment, so much that she almost didn't comprehend his next sentence--"See you later, Sharon. Tomorrow at Dusk."

The rest of Sharon's metamorphosis hadn't been particularly exciting. She had avoided the house until 6 am or so, until she was sure Pops was gone. She had skipped school that day, taken all the boxes of her mom's things from her attic and piled up her own stuff into a haphazard arrangement, tying it into bundles due to the absence of empty boxes. Pete had been true to his word: as the sky first started to shade into dusk, he drove a gigantic black Ford up to her house, and they had loaded it in silence for twenty minutes. When they were done, Sharon leaned against the car for a minute, looking back at that house that had compromised so many years of alternately happiness and hell. But the one person that had given her that happiness was gone now, and wasn't coming back. She was freed by the existence of her sentence, in a way.

"Wanna burn it?" Pete asked nonchalantly, as he lit another cigarette, leaning against the car with her.

Sharon chuckled. "It'd be a nice surprise for the old boy when he comes home from his trip." She pondered the idea. "But no. I'm leaving with a clean slate."

"Smart kid." Pete said, and went around the other side, got in the car and started the engine.

Sharon got in the passenger seat and from that moment on, did not look back.

"Welcome back." Carmen said, as soon as the disoriented look in Liz's eyes cleared. "You said, and I quote, 'A pity, since your roles percludes so much motherhood.' What the hell does 'percludes' mean?"

"I'm sorry, Sharon." Liz said, almost frantically, ignoring Carmen completely. "It's...just this weird thing..."

"I told her." Carmen broke in impatiently. "Sharon's cool: she doesn't care. Come on, what does 'percludes' mean?"

Liz sighed wearily. "It's like...will have to include. Permissary inclusion."

Carmen seemed to take this in, nodding slowly. "Okay. So my 'role', whatever the hell that is, will have to include motherhood. God, Liz, sometimes I really wish I could just pass you off as a nut." But it was said cheerfully. No matter what was said, these girls had a friendship that was bonded in likeness. If one were to be crazy, surely she would find the same issues in her second cousin.

"I'm sure I wish I could, too." Liz said, a little sarcastically, a little pityingly. "Maybe you'll marry a preacher man and wind up with twenty bouncing baby boys."

The images this made in all their minds was hilarious, and when Carmen snorted incredulously, it became a reason for more laughter in and of itself. The three girls were pounding the table and almost upsetting the teacups before the levity ran its course.